My dad bought this printer for my sister to use in college against my advise. I knew that a printer this cheap could not be a very good idea to get. But my dad insisted on buying it for her because it was a Lexmark, and because it had a $50 rebate, making it cost only $50 in the end.

Just looking at the printer you can tell that it is a piece of crap printer, it can barely hold any paper and there is no tray for a printed out sheet to go onto. It just leaves the printer and slides out onto the table.

Setup was pretty easy, installing in minutes. And putting in the ink cartridge was also pretty easy. However, after reading through the manual, I figured out that the printer can't print in color and in black at the same time. It needs separate ink cartridges for each.

A color cartridge with cyan, magenta, and yellow comes with the printer. It prints the color things and since there is no black ink, the printer poorly attempts to mix colors into producing black. What results is a black color that is bluish and doesn't look good at all. We bought a black cartridge to see if it would be better to just print in black and not color anymore, but the results were about the same. The color was more black, but it was still bluish. This would not be acceptable because nobody wants to turn in a college essay that looks horribly printed, it distracts a reader from the content and makes them think, "What the hell?" And each ink thingy costs about $30 and is small, so it runs out pretty quickly.

The ink is not the only problem with printing from this printer, the quality of text and images is really bad. Words are a little smudgy and not sharper like you would see on a higher quality printer. Images come out with colors that do not match the original that you see on the computer screen, and they are blurry and you can't tell what you just printed a picture of. Reds print out as magenta, but other colors are okay.

The printer jams up all the time, causing the user to have to insert one page at a time. And it prints really really slow too. I do not recommend buying this printer unless you like have a crappy printer.

I would only recommend this to people who do not mind poor printing quality, frequent trips to buy more ink, inserting one page at a time, frustration with waiting, and to people who think that cheap is good.

Invest more money in a quality printer. The Lexmark printers that are reliable and worth buying cost more, so don't be stingy when choosing a printer. This goes for all other brands too.

Recommended: No

Amount Paid (US$): 50
Operating System: Windows